Terror Haza

            I was out at a bar a few nights back and I ended up having a drink with a young Hungarian named Attila. It seemed to me as if he had consumed quite a bit of alcohol throughout the day, as his mannerisms wailed emphatically throughout the room and his face poured with innumerable drops of sweat. Regardless of his blood alcohol content however, Attila was a pretty smart dude. He was an economics graduate student at Corvinus in the middle of his master’s thesis (which I think was entitled ‘why Russia sucks’) and had quite a bit to say about the world and its current state of affairs (at least it seemed like he had quite a bit to say at the time).

            

            We spoke about the Forint (the Magyar’s national currency) and why it was so incredibly low compared to the US Dollar and the Euro. He attempted to describe how throughout the Soviet Union’s 45-year occupation of Hungary the communist government had consistently borrowed money from other European banks in Hungary’s name. They did this because the their state-planned and -run economy thing didn’t really work out too well (hence the Union’s collapse). Attila said that Hungary was paying off its Soviet induced debts now, and would continue to be doing so for the foreseeable future. Not only is the barely 20-year-old Hungarian nation learning how to survive in the rapidly globalizing free market economy, but she is also paying off the debts of a government that brutally massacred her sons, daughters and political leaders. Attila didn’t seem bitter while he spoke of the hard times he and his fellow Hungarian’s are currently living through, or the ones that they will inevitably be forced to deal with in the future, but I certainly would’ve understood if he had been.

Later in the week I visited a place called the “Terror House” with the rest of team JSBP.

Andrassy ut 60

 The museum is located about four minutes from my apartment, on a bustling main street in downtown Budapest called Andrassy. Both the Nazis and the Soviets chose this same Neo-Renaissance apartment building as the headquarters for their political actions.

 In 1944 the Nazi’s took control of Budapest. The Hungarian Nazis were referred to as the “Arrow Cross”. During their time in this building, which they called the “House of Loyalty”, they tortured and murdered countless Hungarian Jews and disposed of their bodies into the Danube River.

Arrow Cross (Hungarian Nazis)

 In 1945 the Soviet Union took control of Budapest after the Allies defeated the Nazis. They chose to turn the fascist “House of Loyalty” into their own State Security Authority (AVH). Through this headquarters the communist leaders of Moscow terrorized the Hungarian people; brutally wiping out all political, ethnic, and philosophical opposition using torturous means in the basement of the Andrassy boulevard apartment building. The Soviet officers captured many of Budapest’s most esteemed minds and ruthlessly interrogated them until death, or rather chose to hang them in the corner room of their cellar prison cell. They also used this headquarters to spy on the Magyars, thus determining which one’s would be sent to their forced labor camps in Siberia (the Gulag).

It’s hard to believe that to this very day Hungarians continue to suffer from the Soviet rule, even if only indirectly. I was amazed that Attila wasn’t more emphatic in demanding some sort of compensation from the Russians. “We are a small country,” he said, “no one in the world cares about Hungary”.

Maybe the Red Scare was a little bit more justified than I thought.

Keep it keeping fools,

I’ll keep messing up abroad,

Love,

Mama’s Boy